Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

I am seeing Nutanix the most, then Proxmox, Openshift.

For some sub products, Avi is often going to HAproxy, Aria to a combination of Terraform, Datadog (and others)

If I were running the migration, my preferred pathway would’ve been to Apache Cloudstack. We had the expertise to pull it off, and it would’ve freed us from vendor partners. Nutanix was really only on the list purely from its technology portfolio; its lack of profitability and shifting towards SaaS for features like cost analysis meant that we’d be moving into a similarly bad situation as VMware at the time (wholly beholden to their business priorities instead of our own), which I didn’t care for.

There’s a lot of options out there, most of which are built atop either KVM/QEMU or OpenStack. Virtuozzo’s offerings impressed me, but the lack of a “comprehensive” product was a turnoff. Oxide was incredibly interesting from a simplicity and integration perspective, but the appetite wasn’t there to try a startup’s product. Microsoft and Oracle were both ruled out due to higher costs and more onerous licensing than VMware/Broadcom, while IBM/OpenShift were ruled out as our private cloud estate was 100% VMs with only ~20% of our internal products capable of containerization support.

The biggest advice I can give is to understand your workload today, and determine options accordingly. Everyone’s pitching K8s and containers, but if your estate is majority VMs, then a lot of those options just aren’t worthwhile.

1. Proxmox cannot even join a network using DHCP requiring manual IP configuration.

2. Disk encryption is a hell instead of checkbox in installer

3. Wi-Fi - no luck (rarely used for real servers, but frequently for r&d racks)

Of course, it is a Debian core underneath and a lot of things are possible given enough time and persistence, but other solutions have them out of the box.

In theory, it's great. In practice, if you need to get "support" from someone else, it's not so great anymore, as all these companies have been discovering.

I would use VM technology if whoever wrote it would provide me with a contract saying that if anyone were to find just one program that would crash their VM (while not crashing a real machine) or miscompute, that I would get a billion dollars.

To answer your question: I was smart enough to never use it in the first place.